The campaign became symbolic of modern political vitriol, as both Gahagan Douglas's Democratic primary opponent Manchester Boddy and Nixon referred to her as "pink right down to her underwear", suggesting Communist sympathies.

[2] She was the eldest daughter of Lillian Rose (Mussen) and Walter H. Gahagan, an engineer who owned a construction business in Brooklyn and a shipyard in Arverne, Queens; her mother had been a schoolteacher.

[9] In 1927, at the age of 26, Gahagan set out to forge a new career as an opera singer, and, after two years of voice lessons, she found herself touring across Europe and receiving critical praise, unusual for an American at the time.

[12] Gahagan Douglas went to Los Angeles in 1935, starring in the Hollywood movie She, playing Hash-a-Motep, queen of a lost city.

Gahagan's depiction of the "ageless ice goddess"[13] served as inspiration for the Evil Queen in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

[16] Introduced to politics by her husband,[5] Gahagan Douglas joined the Democratic Party shortly after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

She largely disliked the atmosphere of Hollywood; following the birth of her daughter, Mary Helen, in 1938, Gahagan Douglas took to learning about the plight of migrant workers and grew increasingly politically aware.

[21] In 1946, she was among those honored by the National Association of Colored Women for her role in interracial cooperation for advancing race and gender equality.

[22] In 1943, Democratic leaders, including FDR, persuaded Gahagan Douglas to run in the 1944 election[11] for the 14th Congressional District seat opened by the retirement of Congressman Thomas F.

She also championed a controversial bill to create a Franklin Delano Roosevelt National Forest that would protect California redwoods from Sonoma County to Oregon.

California Democratic state chairman William M. Malone had advised Gahagan Douglas to wait until 1952 to run for the Senate, rather than split the party in a fight with Downey.

Downey withdrew from the race before the primary and supported a third candidate, Manchester Boddy, the owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News.

"[31] In a race that was remembered as one of the most vicious in California political history, Nixon's charges were intentionally directed towards the assassination of Gahagan Douglas's character.

[31] He implied that she was a Communist "fellow traveler" by comparing her votes to those of Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York (a pro-Soviet member of the American Labor Party), and deployed anti-Semitic surrogates to call on voters to reject her because her husband, Melvyn, was Jewish.

[32][11] Nixon won the election by a vote of 2,183,454 (59%) to 1,502,507 (41%), and Gahagan Douglas's political career came to an end, but she remained an activist, continuing to advocate for the regulation of nuclear weapons for several decades.

[39] During and after the Watergate scandal, bumper stickers featuring the legend "Don't blame me, I voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas" cropped up on cars in California.